The vertiginous growth of the micro-electronics market has created a set of spectacular problems both from technical and from the business point of view. The investment required to set up a Very Large Scale of Integration (VLSI) fabrication plant for Deep Sub-Micron (DSM) technologies is in excess of 1 Billion U.S. dollars, and the time to capitalize on that investment is constantly shortening; the speed and power performance capabilities of consumer products and technologies, such as telecommunications, networking, entertainment, and the like become obsolete rapidly and need to be constantly improved.
Therefore, it is desirable for any IC foundry to be able to serve mutliple end-user applications with the same fabrication technology, in order to achieve consistent economy of scale saving.
The problem of modeling and optimizing the electrical properties of integrated devices has been recently explored in the work of M. Miyama and S. Kamohara “Circuit Performance Oriented Device Optimization using BSIM3 Pre-Silicon Model Parameters”, IEEE-ACM Asia-Pacific DAC, Yokohama, JP, January 2000, where the predictive capabilites of standard Bsim3v3 SPICE model have been applied towards modeling and optimization of the critical path of a CPU. SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a family of programs (freeware or commercial) for simulation of electronic circuits, based on a kernel developed by Berkeley University (California, USA) since 1960 with public founds. Today's commercial packages are based on SPICE3f5, and they add to it many functions and features.
In these methods, the target circuits are directly simulated using the SPICE program while manually changing the value of the Bsim3v3 model parameters until the desired specifications are met. This procedure is highly inefficient.
In another recent publication (Y. Cao, T. Sato, M. Orshansky, D. Sylvester and C. Hu, “New Paradigm of Predictive MOSFET and Interconnect Modeling for Early Circuit Simulation”, IEEE 2000 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, Orlando (Fla.), May 2000) the problem of generating predictive SPICE model parameters is also addressed by using the Bsim3v3 standard MOSFET model.
However, different product applications pose different, sometimes conflicting, requirements on the underlying technology components, and the specification of a complete set of device characteristics (such as, for example, MOSFETs threshold voltage and drive current (IDS), trans-conductance (gm), output conductance (gds) and the like, which best fit that large set of multiple, conflicting requirements) is an overwhelming task using the methods and systems of the prior art.